The Obama Budget Farce

There's very little in the president's proposed budget to make me unhappy. Having just spent a weekend driving back roads and state highways between Tennessee and Kentucky, I can tell you that this country actually needs a lot more spending on its infrastructure than he's proposing, but we can live to fight another day on that. I also like the beefed-up SEC and that new thing that's supposed to keep an eye on unfair trade practices overseas. So, yes, by and large, I'm happy.

And, of course, it doesn't have a chance in hell of ever passing.

The fools on the Hill are already in a Santorum over the proposals. Here's well-bronzed figurehead John Boehner, desperately trying to cling to his job:

"The budget also does nothing to protect and preserve important safety net programs for America's seniors. The greatest threat to Americans' retirement security is the status quo, and the president has offered seniors nothing more with this budget. A tidal wave of debt is cresting over important programs like Medicare, and the president continues to look the other way."

Out on the trail, the Clown College has arisen as one to condemn it. Willard Romney stepped up:

This week, President Obama will release a budget that won't take any meaningful steps toward solving our entitlement crisis. The president has failed to offer a single serious idea to save Social Security and is the only president in modern history to cut Medicare benefits for seniors.

And, of course, zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan is said to be working beaverishly on another plan to save Medicare by ending it entirely and spray-painting "MEDICARE" on the urn holding its ashes.

The budget is a campaign document. As such, it's a pretty good one on which to run. As a governing document, it would solve a lot of the nation's problems. But campaigning is as far removed from governing at this point as swimming is from camel-driving. This is a result of the endless propagandizing, not only that all "government" is bad and useless, but also that any participation in the political process is a game for suckers because They'll steal all your money, and They don't care what you think, stout yeoman.

Are people really that mystified by the apparently dissonant attitudes of those people from Chisago County as expressed in that Times story over the weekend? They shouldn't be. Those folks are only repeating what they've been told, over and over again, in a hundred different places.

Many people say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who do not deserve it. But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age.

Did people "feel guilty" about the benefits they were getting from the GI Bill? Did all those generations of elderly who survived because they had Social Security "feel guilty" about not starving to death? The breakdown in the national consensus that we must be a political commonwealth was deliberate and determined, and it's worked so well that now you have people seriously arguing that The Other who is wasting all our money is themselves. The doctrines of the modern Right have engendered not only selfishness and anger, but a profound self-loathing.

We have had nearly four decades of preaching that self-government is merely a marginally interested spectator sport. The roads are still broken because our politics are broken, and because our politics are broken, the country is broken, and it's everybody's fault. The best I can do, I guess, is to say how much I like the idea of that much infrastructure spending. America: A Great Concept.

Charles P. PierceCharles P Pierce is the author of four books, mostly recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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